Juul Labs Documents Collection for North Carolina: Origins of the Juul Labs Documents Collection

This section of the guide gives context on where the documents in the Juul Labs Document Collection are from, and puts the research into the context of the documents and focus of the Industry Documents Library and their partnership with UNC Libraries. 

Documents subject to public disclosure under the terms of JUUL Labs’s 2021 settlement with North Carolina, which resolved the state’s lawsuit against the e-cigarette company. North Carolina sued JUUL Labs in 2019, claiming the company’s marketing practices fueled widespread addiction to nicotine among young people and caused a public health crisis. The North Carolina settlement specifies that the documents be made public through a repository operated and maintained by a North Carolina public university. UNC was selected to serve this role and has partnered with IDL, a document database through UCSF, to host and preserve the documents for permanent public access.

The documents within the database are internal and external documents, including internal communication such as email, of individuals who worked for and/or were involved with Juul Labs. 

The Industry Documents Library is a digital archive of documents created by industries which influence public health, hosted by the University of California, San Francisco Library. Originally established in 2002 to house the millions of documents publicly disclosed in litigation against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, the Library has expanded to include documents from the drug, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries to preserve open access to this information and to support research on the commercial determinants of public health.

You can access the Industry Documents Library home database page linked here. 

Truth Tobacco Industry Documents is within UCSF's Industry Documents Library which contains an archive of 14 million documents created by tobacco companies about their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, scientific research and political activities, hosted by the UCSF Library and created in 2002. It was built to house and provide permanent access to tobacco industry internal corporate documents produced during litigation between US States and the seven major tobacco industry organizations and other sources. These internal documents give a view into the workings of one of the largest and most influential industries in the United States.

You can access the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents page linked here. 

The University of North Carolina (UNC) and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) are partnering together to develop an online searchable public depository of Juul Labs internal documents from the NC vs. Juul Labs lawsuit settlement. Below is a link to the press release detailing the work of the partnership.